ess of birth and connection; we must try
and do this in order to understand what, to Louise of Stolberg, was the
full value of the fact of becoming the wife of Charles Edward Stuart.
One hundred and twelve years ago, and seventeen years before the great
revolution which yawns, an almost impassable gulf, between us and the
men and women of the past, a woman, a girl of nineteen, and a Canoness
of Ste. Wandru of Mons, need have been of no base temper if, on the
eve of such a wedding as this one, her mind had been full of only one
idea: the idea, monotonous and drowningly loud like some big cathedral
bell, "I shall be a Queen." But if Louise of Stolberg was, as is most
probable, in some such a state of vague exultation, we must remember
also that there may well have entered into such exultation an element
with which even we, and even the most austerely or snobbishly democratic
among us, might fully have sympathised. Her mother, her sister, her
brother-in-law, and the old Duke of Fitz-James, who had made up her
marriage and married her by proxy, and every other person who had
approached her during the last month, must have been filling the mind of
Louise of Stolberg with tales of the '45 and of the heroism of Prince
Charlie. And her mind, which, as afterwards appeared, was romantic,
fascinated by eccentricity and genius, may easily have become enamoured
of the bridegroom who awaited her, the last of so brilliant and ill-fated
a race, the hero of Gladsmuir and Falkirk, at whose approach the
Londoners had shut their shops in terror, and the Hanoverian usurper
ordered his yacht to lie ready moored at the Tower steps; the more than
royal young man whom (as the Jacobites doubtless told her) only the
foolish and traitorous obstinacy of his followers had prevented from
reinstating his father on the throne of England. Historical figures,
especially those of a heroic sort, remain pictured in men's minds at
their moment of glory; and this was the case particularly with the Young
Pretender, who had disappeared into well-nigh complete mystery after his
wonderful exploits and hairbreadth escapes of the '45; so that in the
eyes of Louise of Stolberg the man she was about to marry appeared most
probably but little changed from the brilliant youth who had marched on
foot at the head of his army towards London, who had held court at
Holyrood and roamed in disguise about the Hebrides.

Still, it is difficult to imagine that as the hours of mee